Ai Weiwei at the Tate Turbine Hall

“Sunflower Seeds,” the much-awaited installation by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, has opened. (“I love this work,” Adrian Searle writes in his Guardian review, giving it five stars. He compares it to work by Wolfgang Laib, Richard Long, and Antony Gormley. “Sunflower Seeds, however, is better. It is audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable. It is a work of great simplicity and complexity.”)

The project is almost exactly what it sounds like: a hundred million life-size porcelain sunflower seeds—each hand-molded, fired, and painted by a crew of ceramicists in Jingdezhen, China’s most famous pottery town. The project has been an open secret in Ai’s circle for months, but this is the first time that all hundred million seeds are being shown in public. It is a vast sea of gray seeds that weighs a hundred and fifty tons, and visitors are encouraged to walk through and toy with them. (What if people steal them? The Guardian asks, and Ai gives an elliptical answer.)

I saw the seeds in progress for the first time about seven months ago at Ai’s studio in Beijing, when I was writing a Profile of him for the magazine. Ai led me into a room about the size of a squash court, and, without explanation, we climbed out onto a rippling, crunching mass of objects that looked, at first glance, like ordinary seeds. I crouched down and ran my hands through the cool mass beneath my feet. The seeds are heavier than expected; each one is both naturalistic and ornate. Chinese people munch on sunflower seats all day but these are as inedible, Adrian Searle points out, as the marble sugar cubes produced by Duchamp, Ai’s icon. “It is like an ocean, right?” Ai said, as we crouched on them. There were fifteen million so far, he said, swiveling around to examine them. “This is less than the population of Beijing. It’s strange to look at it, but in total it will be almost ten times more than this.”

As a finished product, this piece has some obvious resonance to Ai’s other obsessions these days. Ai has been intensely focused on Twitter, sending his rants and declarations and appeals to thirty-six thousand Chinese readers who are—Who are they, actually? And where are they? Beijing? The hinterlands? Who knows? Whoever they are, they have never met in person but are united by a belief in an idea strong enough to keep them reading, despite the fact that Twitter is banned and can only be accessed through some technical gymnastics. Ai is also obsessed with other sets of numbers: the more than five thousand children who died in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008—in part because of faulty school construction—as well as the thirty to forty-five million people who died during the famine following the Great Leap Forward. Never have sunflower seeds been this political.

For years, Ai produced single objects that demanded attention—sometimes more plaintively than some critics would have liked. But for this piece, his most high-profile yet, he subverted his own habits and made a hundred million objects that were as seemingly, deceptively interchangeable as the names on his list of earthquake victims. The timing is apt: the exhibition opens just days after news of Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize—a moment of recognition for another irascible, polarizing Chinese intellectual who has dedicated himself to prodding and testing the boundaries of tolerable speech.

For his seeds, Ai had three hundred people working for years to produce them, he told me. “First I made three million. It was like a little mountain. Then you realize it is less than the number of cars in Beijing.”